Comments on: DISCUSSION: Euro-American War over Yongsan Foreign School

By: Rick

Rick — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 04:18:30 +0000

…when the faculty changes to a non-missionary one, which it will have to do to live up to a secular promise, and to ensure that it is offering best-in-class teaching, then the costs will definitely change. The math is simple, take the cost of a teacher’s salary and benefits, add accommodation, divide by 20 (for the number of kids in a class) then add another 25% for non-teaching costs and 1000th of the capital costs (assuming that school is paying its share here and is not all subsidized by the tax payer) and you have a base case. In fact, the staff:student ratio ought to be less than 1:20 in a good school….probably more like 1:10, especially in the higher grades…. Net result, stand by either for a renege on the secular promise or a hike in fees…unless it is hidden by the taxpayer…in which case the Koreans ought to kick up a stink!

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 15:10:00 +0000

I know it isn’t fair but the reason the Seoul government put all that money in was to attract people to invest in Korea. They want to do that because it is good for Korea; bringing in jobs and opprtunity for Korean people. The people they want to attract do have other choices and that is why they had to find something better than other options in competing cities. They didn’t do that. Probably not because the process was rigged but because they don’t have the knowledge in Korea to find what would have been best-in-class. And the role of AmCham should have been to help them do that…which clearly they failed at. I don’t know why that is because AmCham is stuffed full of people who have moved around and know the alternatives, maybe they just didn’t try hard enough? EUCCK should also have been able to point the direction, seems they didn’t argue their case well enough either. The costs quoted are about par for the course in any quality international school, ludicrous it may be, but most of them are not-for-profit. If there was a way to deliver the education for $5000 per year I expect someone would have thought of it, put it in place and charged it out at $17,000 and would now be living in a huge mansion in a tax-free haven….

By: Brendon Carr

Brendon Carr — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 16:03:32 +0000

The sense of entitlement is really pretty galling. The “foreign community” — especially those doing the bitching — have almost zero “skin in the game”. All this bitching is over foreign investors’ displeasure with the method by which Seoul managed its $10 million to US$135 million (depending on how you do the counting) gift to establish a school for rich kids. Don’t want to come here because of a lack of schools exactly to your liking? Don’t come here, jackass!

By: hardyandtiny

hardyandtiny — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 14:56:44 +0000

Well what is the alternative for people who CAN’T afford it? Who really is worried about people that can pay 17 million a year to send their kid to elementary school? Are you fucking kidding me!?
It’s all relative………no it’s not! You’re paying too much! School should only cost 4-500 a month at most!

By: Rick

Rick — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 14:10:03 +0000

Anybody whose kids go to school must be rich….

By: hardyandtiny

hardyandtiny — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 12:48:40 +0000

this is a bunch of rich people arguing about where their kids go to school.

By: gbnhj

gbnhj — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:55:03 +0000

Brendon, could you provide the AmCham document from which the Dong-A piece pulled its information? As you said, the Dong-A piece ‘willfully misquoted’ the AmCham statement, so it would be really helpful to look at the original source in order to determine the accuracy of that newspaper article.

By: Rick

Rick — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:06:53 +0000

I expect we’ll hear much more when people get back from vacation…the AmCham leadership will probably start showing the cracks then…unless they really do all support this…which would run counter to their opinion prior to the vacation.

By: Sperwer

Sperwer — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 10:36:18 +0000

Brendon:

I’m shocked — shocked — that you’d defend the American Chamber for the Promotion of Korean Interests. I don’t know on what basis you characterize the Donga piece as misquoting Amcham. From what I know, the quote in the article pretty accurately reflects the actual opinion of the overwhelming number of AMCHAM members with children in international schools. Of course, it could still be a misquotation insofar as the view of their constitutuency is not currently represented by those in the leadership with the authority to speak for the organization (and the rest of the leaders have been suborned into acquiescence under the banner of expediency), but I’d be surprised if there weren’t in fact documentation for statements of the sort quoted being made by the organization within fairly recent memory.

By: Brendon Carr

Brendon Carr — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 04:33:13 +0000

It’s hardly top news that people have been complaining, and that despite the construction of one new facility the overall educational environment has not magically been transformed from “unsatisfactory” to “fabulous”. The Dong-A Ilbo piece also quite willfully misquotes AmCham, so one can imagine how the other quotations may or may not have been accurate. Also, a survey of five or six dozen people hardly captures the prevailing mood. There is still a lot of work to do, and the Yongsan International School is not the end of the road (hopefully).